What We Eat in Yellowstone

I am not trying to cook elaborate meals on a camp stove after driving through Yellowstone all day.

I'm also not trying to figure out dinner at 7 p.m. while everyone is hungry and tired.

So before we leave, I make things that freeze well and reheat easily. Chili. Soup. Sausage gravy. Pre-cooked ground beef. Breakfast burritos. Pancake batter in a bottle.

Some of it goes into the cooler frozen. Some of it goes into the dry bin. Some of it becomes the first night's dinner so we don't have to think when we roll into camp.

The more I can front-load at home, the more the trip feels like a trip instead of a series of errands with a view.

I've tried so many different coolers.

Some are good. Some are better. Some are the best option for the amount you want to spend.

And then there's the YETI.

I know they're expensive. I didn't start here either.

But after years of camping with four kids, this is the combination I've landed on because the two coolers are doing two completely different jobs.

Our hard-sided YETI stays at camp.

This is the cooler I care about keeping cold. It's holding the food I've prepared for several days, so I don't want everyone opening it constantly.

This is basically our Yellowstone refrigerator.

It's also where my freezer-bag system comes in.

Whenever possible, I freeze prepared foods flat in freezer bags instead of packing everything in bulky containers.

Chili. Soup. Steaks. Eggs. Sausage gravy. Ground beef.

I can then organize the bags vertically inside the cooler almost like a filing cabinet.

I also freeze things we're going to consume anyway, like milk or orange juice. They're already part of our food plan, but while they're frozen they're also helping keep everything else cold.

The goal is to use as much of that cooler space for actual food as possible.

The backpack cooler has a completely different job.

This is the workhorse.

It's flexible. I can carry it. It fits into the car more easily than hauling another hard-sided cooler around, and it goes wherever we're going that day.

In the morning, I load it from the camp cooler.

Then we go.

This is where the sandwiches, drinks, cheese, yogurt, fruit, breakfast, snacks and whatever else we need that day live.

If we're making dinner somewhere in the park, I'll load those ingredients too.

It's the cooler I'm perfectly fine opening 47 times because someone suddenly needs a cheese stick.

And because it's a backpack, if we find somewhere we want to wander farther from the car, we can actually bring it with us.

I want to say one more thing about how the camp cooler actually gets packed, because this is the part that makes the whole thing work.

Freezer bags, frozen flat, stacked vertically. That's it. That's the whole system.

When everything is flat, you can see it. When it's vertical, you can flip through it. When it's frozen, it stays cold and acts as its own ice pack.

I don't have to unstack containers or dig to the bottom of a cooler to find the chili. I just pull out the bag labeled “chili.”

The vertical filing system means the camp cooler stays organized for several days, which matters because nobody wants to reorganize a cooler in the dark while hungry kids stand nearby.